5 Reasons Why Talking Is Pointless

I could feel her self-consciousness from my corner of the elevator, the way her face turned slightly crimson, and the way she shuffled slightly backwards. The gentleman in front of us turned with a distressed face at the noxious odor, demanding to know which one of us had contaminated the air.

“Why is it”, I asked the man, “that people always demand to know who farted as though they’ll decide how disgusted they’ll be based on the person responsible?”

For the rest of that afternoon I kept asking myself: What is the point of all these useless verbal sounds? To fill air and deprive one of silence? I also thought: Why, whenever I research the opinion on a topic, am I met with such an immense discrepancy and variety of opinions?

Listening to the conversations of others, getting involved in conversations of my own and reading discussions online, have taught me how little I enjoy social interaction of the conversational sort.

5 Ways Opinionated Conversation is Futile

1# Emotional and Mental State At The Time

Often I’ve found myself vigorously liking or disliking a book I’ve read, movie I’ve watched or place I was at. Often, after revisiting them, I’d realize it wasn’t always because of the recipient of my attention, but more to do with my emotional or mental state at the time.

As human beings, our perceptions and our critical factors are at the mercy of our whimsical filters of life. Unlike computers, we filter life through how we feel in that precise moment. After a certain experience in life, we find a song, a book, a movie or meet a person that we feel speaks to us and in turn our critical factors are controlled and haltered.

For example, if you’re tired, frustrated and in a negative state of mind after a long day while watching a complex movie, the film will make you impatient and will seem unpleasant. If you’ve recently lost a family member and a song comes on the radio about the loss of a loved one, that song will touch all the right feelings. Keep that in mind the next time you’re reading reviews online.

2# Psychological Conditioning and Re-activeness

Your upbringing will certainly play a large part in your forming of opinions. We react according to our conditioning.

For example, if you’ve grown up as a vegetarian and you’re presented with meat, you reactively become nauseated and sick. This isn’t because of the food but because of your psychological conditioning as a child. A meat eater conditioned to eat meat will feel appetite, not nausea, and will be happy and thrilled… yet he too is conditioned.

This reminds me of renown Psychologist and Behaviorist B.F Skinner, who tested on mice his theories of conditioning. The mice must of thought “poor Skinner is a good man, but you have to condition him first. When I push this button, my breakfast comes in immediately. I have conditioned him perfectly, yet he thinks he’s conditioning me!”

To people raised religiously, activities, topics or art involving that which is seen as ‘sinful’ will make them react with aversion. To one who has conditioned himself through belief as an atheist, religious ideas will force him to react angrily. No matter what, your opinion is a reactive slave to your conditioning.

3# Ignorance From Lack of Knowledge

You base your opinions on knowledge you have on the subject. Knowledge is gained either from information or experiences. Both these qualities are relative in each person. How often have you heard people complaining or gossiping about something you realized was unfounded, because you took into consideration a piece of information they didn’t?

Similarly, often we hear in the news of uncovered scandalous videos or affairs of respectable public figures that were once praised, and now ridiculed. The more knowledge you have, the more capable you are of being empathetic or humble enough to not be as quick to judge. Experiences are vital to form opinions because they serve to create comparisons.

A person that’s never been to Europe or has interest in its culture will find European films tedious, while one that has, will marvel at how well the European society has been captured and portrayed. Someone who has never eaten good or authentic Indian cooked food, may find their local corner Indian Restaurant a delight for the senses and recommend it to all their friends.

Isn’t that what the majority of conversation is? Opinionated recommendations? Your opinion on anything will be highly based on how much experience and information you have about the person/film genre/culture/thought system/dog breed/car radiator. Knowledge is relative in a person.

4# Narration of an Anecdote

Many times I’ve found myself in the situation where someone is narrating to me this ‘hilarious’ “This one time….” incident that made me feel like an autistic person in comparison with the laughter the memory invoked in them. Granted it’s not really their fault. Certainly the occurrence must have been quite amusing, and I do gain pleasure by serving as a catalyst for them to remember the event and get overjoyed all over again. But the expectation of me finding it as amusing as they do is absurd.

Whenever you experience a situation you feel is anecdote worthy, you’ll realize most of the amusement is gained from the moment in which it happened. There’s a build up of energy you feel surge through your body when that event happened that the person you narrate to won’t feel as you did.

This happens all the time. e.g. You may have been in a small group in a room, there’s an atmosphere of awkwardness you know you’re all feeling, the contextual build up of not knowing what to say rises, and then someone spontaneously says; “_____” and everyone roars with laughter. But when you relate this to someone, the interest of the recipient is not the same as your own. Or the adrenaline and despair you’re feeling when your sports team is down by one and you’re watching the match live, the physical tension is building and then suddenly out of the blue; ___ passes it to ___, ___ does the impossible and …Goal!!! Narrating to someone something will never be as amusing as having experienced it.

5# Communication Through Words

Lastly, opinions are conveyed through words. And words are the most complex, arbitrary, relative symbolic forms there are. Words encompass all of the above reasons why communication via these symbols is a hindrance to connecting with another. Words are deceiving.

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When two people say “I Love You”, what one person associates and defines with the word “love”, the other person can associate with an entirely different experience. For some love can mean comfort, for others it can be emotional pangs of acceptance and understanding and yet for others it can mean fear of getting hurt and consequently a need to control the other. It’s all dependent on your conditioning towards what feelings you’ve labeled as what, yet funny enough we’re all using the same words.

What I define as “beautiful” is relative to what I’m comparing it too (which in itself is dependent on the quantity of experience and information the observer has) and what appeals to their relative and arbitrary taste of what they find attractive. The petals of a flower can be called “beautiful” as can the vastness of the sky or a starry night. But are they both the same type of beautiful? Does everything you label “beautiful” arouse the exact same feeling inside of you?

Summary

Everyone is in search of the ‘absolute’, and the right objective opinion, or else we wouldn’t waste so much time with aimless discussion. Whether that absolute opinion exists I don’t know, although I’ve listed why our subjective perception of it is why we’ll never find it. In my next article I’ll explain what meaningful benefits I’ve discovered in conversing with others. Feel free to comment below with your thoughts, this is merely my subjective opinion after all.

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I have given up on most talking. I much prefer to write, as I have time to ruminate over what I am trying to communicate. Here is my favorite quote from Charles Stewart. As a child in London, Stewart listened to the conversation of dinner guests such as history scholar Henry Thomas Buckle who would sometimes discourse engagingly for twenty minutes on a topic. Boldface has been added to excerpts: 1

His thoughts and conversation were always on a high level, and I recollect a saying of his, which not only greatly impressed me at the time, but which I have ever since cherished as a test of the mental calibre of friends and acquaintances. Buckle said, in his dogmatic way: “Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas.”

I’ve simply began to talk less because of the ridiculous frequency with which I end up putting my foot firmly in my mouth. In fact one of my New Year Resolutions for 2015 was simply “talk less”.
I’ve never been much of a social creature, I’ve always been a thinker not a speaker and I find it incredibly difficult to articulate my feelings into words. I’m a big fan of poetry (both reading it and writing my own) because I think its a great way to express thoughts, feelings and emotions without conforming to conventional conversation styles.
Conversation is just some kind of social dance that I’ve never quite learned the steps or rythm to and i always stumble.

I’m a huge fan of the popular Mark Twain quote, so much that I’ve printed it out and stuck it on the wall above my desk;
“Its better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

Avoiding to talk out of fear of making mistakes or looking silly is something you should explore more.

It’s one thing to prefer silence because you see through most of the meaningless conversations and crave for something deeper, but when our actions are decided based on a fear; then it provides an opportunity to learn something about ourselves from the experience.

Why do you become nervous in conversations? Why are you afraid of making a mistake?

For a long time I’ve had a lot of difficulties with social interactions for many reasons. I know how much of a cliche it is for people to say “I’ve always felt different from everyone else”, but it is true. I feel like I’m on some kind of different wavelength from everybody else and I have trouble interesting people in conversation.
Either I’ll bore people with safe and easy small talk, or (if I speak my mind a bit more) I’ll come off as “a bit weird” or “creepy” (their words, not mine).

It’s tough for me to explain, but due to certain mental health issues I’ve just had a great deal of trouble sustaining any friendships and I guess keeping quiet is just my way of playing it safe so I don’t drive anyone away.

In any case I prefer being more quiet now because, like lelia says below me, I think there is a lot of advantages to being a great listener in a big world of talkers.

I can understand how you would feel distant and detached from everyone else; it is the nature of being different or filling different to make of one an outcast.

As long as you are aware of the arising issues within you, it is enough to begin observing these qualities within you and applying awareness to free yourself from their influence.

There is much wealth to be gained by simply being present; when we are dying to say something or thinking what to say next we lose much of our present moment awareness of what the other person is saying, what is happening around us and what is happening within us.

As the old proverb goes; God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason. Listening is one of the finest virtues, but unfortunately most people only ‘hear’ until the other is done so they can have their turn of talking.

Well, conversations are not always pointless, because you can share useful informations, teach people, or speaking good think and tell people when they wrong and what should they do (I mean in a good way). But there are many pointless conversation, what are really a waste, like telling good things about yourself while you keep other peoples in background, or teaching people to do idiot things (they are really following it), and the people usually idiot talking, like how they got drunk yesterday, they had one thousand girlfriend, being proud of how wealthy they are, and how they fuck up everyone life.

Language to help people learn through teaching and point out their faults is also very limited. In the first place the person has to be open and ready to learn. Often for example I’ve read books or had conversations with people who said something and I didn’t pay much attention to it. But as I grew older and experienced more, I found immense truth and depth in what that person had said.

There is an old story of Lao Tzu, where he was telling his disciples that those who truly have anything deep and meaningful to say, don’t say anything and those who have nothing of value, will talk and talk for hours. One of the disciples asked him why that was. Lao Tzu asked him to think of a rose, the disciple did, and then Tzu asked the disciple to try and describe it’s fragrance.

Language is only useful as a factual tool, to create a somewhat structured and organized society through informing people of the time the bus comes and giving directions to someone who’s lost. When it comes to anything to do with emotions, feelings, meaningful depth, languages fall very short. Hence the beauty of poetry, it’s not factual, but it uses language to give you glimpses of something, without actually explaining it in detail.

It’s ironic eh? We’re using language to try and discuss how helpful it is…and even here it falls short to convey its limitations. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this! :)

I agree. Sometimes I wonder why I ever bother to share my opinion because I know that people believe what they believe because of their context and I can never say what I mean in a way that will convey my exact meaning to anyone else. Sometimes I think that we as humans share our thoughts because it makes us feel less alone but ultimately the only one who really gets me is myself,

Rosie, very well said. I think it’s really impossible to communicate what we truly feel, we can fool ourselves into thinking that others perfectly understand us, and they might catch glimpses of what we are truly feeling inside, but deep down, the most beautiful inner feelings and experiences can only be spoken through an understanding silence with another person, where you both realize the limitations of language and enjoy each others company without the need to say anything.

The world is plagued with misunderstanding and misconceptions because of our innate tendency to try and simplify things, to make assumptions, mental shortcuts and label or attribute a person to be weird, a freak or serial killer just because his different in the way he socializes. Empathy and understanding of others is very difficult, so I cant really blame many people for taking the easy shortcut method of labeling and passing on the misconceptions to others.

I agree communication is essential but only in practical aspects of communication for daily tasks. But it requires the person to be wise enough in their use of words, to realize that their definitions may be different from the listeners and to keep that always in mind when speaking especially when using words that label others positively or negatively as it leads to so many misunderstandings in relationships.

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Walk the path less traveled

Our names are Aletheia Luna and Mateo Sol and we currently live in Perth, Western Australia.

Our mission is to help others embrace the path of the lone wolf and listen to the soul’s calling. Our goal is to provide a grounded and balanced perspective of spirituality that doesn’t bypass the raw, real, and messy aspects of spiritual growth or psychological development.

We are deeply drawn to exploring and exposing both the light and shadow side of human nature and spirituality. We strive towards integration, balance, wholeness, and embracing both the sacred and wild aspects of being human. Read more.